pensions

Olivia S. Mitchell and Elizabeth Kennedy discuss implications of the treasury department’s decision to allow employers to pay out retirees’ pensions with a one-time lump sum payment, thus reversing Obama-era guidance that had banned this practice. Listen to the full piece above. Interview begins at 3:35. This segment originally aired…Read More

Some observers have recently suggested that multiemployer or industry pension plans in the U.S. have bounced back fully since the 2008 recession, and it’s time to break out the champagne. Not so fast!…Read More

Recently some analysts have queried: why do so few Americans participate in their pension plans? For this purpose, the pension participation rates, or the fraction of employees who either contribute to a defined contribution (DC) plan or are covered by a defined benefit (DB) plan, is often used as a key performance metric for the U.S. voluntary employer plan system.…Read More

Concerns are growing about how to best manage risk in retirement. Traditional defined benefit plans can impart considerable risk to employers, while 401(k)-type plans place all or most risk on employees.…Read More

There is an emerging financial crisis among multiemployer pension plans in America. These plans are a subset of private sector defined benefit pensions covering 10 million workers and retirees. Most critical are the projected bankruptcies of the Teamsters Central States and the United Mineworkers of America plans, making front page news for the last several months. These plans and many others were undermined by two financial market crashes between 2000 and 2009, corporate bankruptcies, de-regulation, and over-regulation. It will now take more than hope to fix them.…Read More

Defined contribution plans – often known as 401k plans – have become the mainstay of US company pensions, yet their main function has been to get employees to save and invest during their work years. These plans haven’t been successful at delivering lifetime income benefits, as a rule: fewer than one-fifth of all such plans today help workers convert their plan assets into retirement paychecks.…Read More

Many U.S. state and local employee pensions are facing dire problems as massive plan liabilities come due, threatening to drain government coffers. As Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh wrote in the Journal of Finance, 21 state pensions held less than 40 percent of the assets needed to pay benefits. Their estimate of the aggregate “funding gap” faced by states was roughly $2.5 trillion in 2009. Since then, the story has not improved, and it has likely worsened. Puerto Rico recently joined Detroit as a case study of fiscal and public pension mismanagement and failure, and the Puerto Rican pension is essentially without any assets.…Read More

When Detroit went bankrupt in 2013, estimates of pension shortfalls multiplied overnight. The city’s regular actuarial firm had reported pension underfunding at $600 million. A special study performed by a second actuarial firm showed underfunding of $3.5 billion.…Read More

Chile provides a safety net for those who fall into poverty in old age, but it’s still an imperfect pension system that needs work.

Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) retirement programs in the U.S. and many European countries are struggling to remain solvent in the face of an aging population, fewer workers, and a shortfall in private savings. A different approach would strengthen individual savings accounts by requiring workers to contribute out of pre-tax income, combined with a redistributive means-tested safety net for those who fall into poverty in old age.…Read More